“That’s right, little captain. Everyone has their little tricks. You wanted your friends to be safe. For now, they are. But that tug you feel in your legs? That’s the whirlpool sucking you to the bottom. You only got a bit of it, but your friends can hardly move by now. Every step they take will burn like fire and cut like knives. Real damage, real pain for every broken step the skill allows them. They’ll stay put until I come back. I’ll still get them. It’s just a delay.”

Delay.

The word reverberated in Marco’s head. Every second he delayed was a second his friends had to heal. It was a second for them to get back on their feet. It was another second the old woman would have to think of something, anything that could help.

Each moment was also a second for Steed to recover, to get back to a fully healed state that Marco couldn’t grapple with, to close the gap between them so there would be even less chance of Marco keeping him here, in this room, and the hell away from his friends.

It would also be a change of plans. Elisa wouldn’t like that.

For better or worse, Marco would never be the team’s planning type. He was fine with that. Elisa had set up this whole thing a certain way, assuming that Marco could take care of it from there. He decided to trust her on that and stay the course.

With the captain already bleeding, Marco wasted no time. Steed swung the axe at his head, but he ducked and managed to get a shot off at the bigger man’s knee. It didn’t sink in, but the force of it opened the captain’s stance just enough for Marco to get out of the way of a follow-up shield bash, slash a deep cut into his axe hand, and then spin out of the way.

Marco was doing damage, just not enough. Steed looked at his hand and laughed, like it didn’t matter at all.

“It’s funny, you know. Every single ship of mine you sunk made me just a little bit stronger. That’s how my skill works. If a ship stays in my armada, I get a bit of credit for everything they do. If they die while in it, I get a lump sum. I figured out a long time ago that the system doesn’t favor treating people like investments.”

Marco stayed silent and popped another shot at him. Steed slapped it out of the way with his shield.

“Which means right now, you are fighting me after a major power up. The biggest one I’ve ever had, really. And guess what?” Steed picked up a rock and tossed it at Marco. It was a casual throw, and Marco barely got out of the way. “Still getting stronger, courtesy of your friends out there.”

Marco took the fastest mental inventory of his entire life. His friends weren’t likely to show if what Steed said about his powers was true. The town couldn’t be counted on to get to them very quickly. Unless Steed was a much better actor than Marco would have guessed, the man really was getting stronger.

But Marco wasn’t exactly weak, either. He had made one attack on Steed and it had gone pretty well. For all the big man’s talk, it had been a pretty even thing. Sure, if Steed had hit Marco, it was possible it would have taken him out straight away. But it was also possible that, between his new equipment and his new levels, Marco was getting pretty strong himself. Steed had taken a big bite out of his own armada, so to speak, but so had Marco.

And Marco wasn’t hurt. Regripping his sword, he decided to go all-out.

“Oh, there he is.” Steed laughed. “Good on you, boy! Brave. I promise I’ll put whatever powers you have to good use.”

Marco ignored him, dodging a horizontal ax swing by a hair, firing his gun at center mass, and going into a stabbing frenzy that forgot all caution. If Steed was getting better, Marco had to get ahead of that effect and make him worse. The aggression, it seemed, caught his opponent off guard. Steed had three or four hits with a rapier sink into his skin before he surged forward with his shield, knocking Marco dizzy as it clanked off his head.

Marco backpedaled as fast as he could as the fog in his head kept him from truly seeing what was going on. Dodging an axe swing was a calculated thing, a battle between force and precision. With his skull aching and his eyes cloudy from a bell-clanging, bone-cracking hit to his brain, he couldn’t fight normally and come out on top. The only thing he could do was to pepper shots from his gun in roughly the right direction as he stayed out of range entirely.

He wasn’t completely successful at it.

Steed continued to slash at him, ripping through his buccaneer clothes and covering him with cuts. The pain cleared his head slowly and gradually, allowing him to fight back. The captain had gotten a little too confident in his forward charge and a little too desperate to swat down the fly coming after him. When the last of Marco’s disorientation cleared, he had no way of knowing it until Marco suddenly jerked forward after a particularly large swing. With his newly returned accuracy and several second to aim, his dream of making Steed need an eyepatch was almost realized. His sword slashed at Steed’s face and grew a gash on the man’s cheek before defensive reflexes forced him to jump back out of the way of yet another axe swing.

“You think that will stop me?” Steed bellowed. “Really? Me? After everything I’ve done to get here? After living and thriving in the outer ocean? After…”

“After stealing something and running?” Marco guessed. He had been thinking about that a long time. Steed jerked to almost a near stop, something Marco took full advantage of, stabbing him a few times in the chest. “When we uncovered this place, it told us that there were two people looking for it who had been told. None of them were you. I’m guessing you stole that map, right?”

“Shut up!” Steed screamed. “I didn’t run!”

“See, that’s not what someone who didn’t run would say.” Marco jumped around the captain, peppering him with rapier hits. “So I have a question. Why do you need that whole armada when most of them are trash? Sure, it might add up, but it’s trouble. We saw how stripped that island was. You aren’t even able to keep them fed.”

“Boy, you don’t know what you are talking about. You’re afraid.”

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“No, but I have guesses. I’m guessing you are a coward.” The mere use of the word sent Steed forward with the most powerful swing Marco had seen him attempt. By the very nature of it, it was an attack meant to be dodged and retaliated against. “See, you don’t need all those low-quality captains and ships unless you want to leave them in your wake as distractions so you can get away. So you can run from whoever the real captain is.”

“You don’t know!” The captain’s eyes were wild now. “You haven’t been out there! It would knock you down too!”

“Maybe.” Marco dodged a few more blows, though these were too wild and unpredictable to really counter. “But not everyone fails, right? I still might do well. You’ve already failed.”

The attacks that came next were so predictable that Marco landed a counter on each and every one of them as easily as if he were sparring with a child. His guess about this captain had been close enough to the truth to hit a nerve. A good raw one.

“So tell me, what happens when Tyrus of the Flaming Docks catches up?” Marco taunted and got another stab in. “What happens when he shows up and chases you down?”

“You little —”

By the time Steed started to realize how much damage he was taking, the man had already let Marco get close enough to put all his weight into a stab into Steed’s thigh and a zero-distance, point-blank gunshot into his ribs.

Steed’s eyes cleared as he staggered back, his form returning to something resembling order. Before, after the attacks from the town had landed on him, he had been bloodied. He had gotten worse as they ran to the temple from tree attacks, arrow fire, and localized rockslides. Now, for the first time, he was beginning to look haggard. Staggered, even. Like these attacks had finally broken through some sort of barrier of resistance and turned him back into a mere man.

“Before that, you’ll die.” Steed’s talkativeness was all dried up now, it seemed. “You’ll die now.”

The fight devolved to chaos.

Marco knew his only chance was to pour on every bit of damage he could to continue the pattern, but it was easier said than done. He knew he could tank some amount of the pirate’s shots now, but every time he caught even a glancing blow he was sent reeling. Steed did his best to make this happen as often as possible, bashing with his shield beneath almost every axe swing and making as many angles of approach deadly as he could.

Marco thought it might work out in his favor for a longer time than he’d later admit. Sure, his gun eventually slipped out of his hand as his bleeding ruined his grip. Sure, his vision kept going double. But he got the gun back and was still landing hits, and he told himself that would eventually be enough. And it was, right up until it very much wasn’t.

“Ooof. I almost feel sorry for you.” The captain limped his way towards Marco, who was forced to put his rapier into the ground as a makeshift cane to keep himself up. He was reasonably sure he could still move towards the man and hit him, but it would be an unsteady kind of thing, something that the last few efforts to do the same thing had proved were no longer effective.

It felt like there was hot sand in his lungs and molten metal in his legs. Even standing to look at Steed was starting to be a herculean task.

Steed had outlasted him, pure and simple. The pirate wasn’t in good shape by any means. Marco had given everything he had, and everything was quite a bit these days. The pirate captain was all cuts, blood, bullet holes, and bruises, but he was standing steady enough that there was nothing Marco could do. Before, he had speed and evasion on the bigger pirate, who had force on his side. Now Steed had everything. He held every card.

“That’s it, then.” Steed lifted his axe. “Don’t worry about me, boy. I’m sure the power I get from taking you down will be more than enough to get free from this island with. Hold still if you want this over quick, I suppose. Or don’t. Doesn’t matter much to me.”

“Screw that.” Marco pulled his sword out of the dirt and pointed it. He couldn’t lunge anymore, but he was pretty sure he could lurch. If he was doomed, he’d be doomed with style and buy his friends every second he could. “Here I come.”

Everything happened like time had slowed down. He shifted his balance forward, then saw with crystal clarity as Steed pulled back his axe for one last fatal chop. Marco pushed off with his legs fully aware that he was moving too slow to get there on time and too unbalanced to dodge. At most, he’d make it far enough into axe range to keep the leader of the armada from having to stretch out his arms too far.

And then, just as he expected his own flesh to squelch under the blade, he heard a different sound. A thunk. Steed jerked in place and allowed Marco’s rapier to pierce his stomach as the club that had struck him clattered to the stone floor.

“That’s all I got.” Riv sounded from somewhere behind Steed. “I’m going to pass out now.”

He did. Next to him, Aethe lifted her bow and fired the first of many arrows.

“Elisa couldn’t make it. I had mobility and Riv had vitality and we barely did,” she explained. The third arrow had hit Steed in the back by the time she finished her sentence. “That hurt. Every step.”

Steed was still trying to chop Marco, but the shock of arrow after arrow hitting his back combined with Marco’s weight cranking on his sword was too much for him to actually make good on his efforts. They kept at it. Marco saw how Steed’s lead, which had seemed so big a few moments ago, was as thin as a sheet of paper. The first couple arrows erased it. The last several erased him.

Marco fell with Steed as the pirate gave up on life once and for all. He could see when the last of Steed’s curse left Aethe. She limped over on two unsteady legs and a bow, but she made it, collapsing by Marco’s side on the stone floor as they both sweated and bled on the floor.

“Think she’ll come?” Aethe asked. “The old woman. I’m pretty sure we’ll need someone else to patch us up.”

“Probably,” Marco said. “It’s hard to imagine her overlooking anything like that. She tied up all the pirates but Steed.”

“She’s sort of incredible.”

“Yeah. Funny that’s the first thing that pops into our mind,” Marco said. “I think there’s something to that charisma stat, after all. Without her, we’d be dead three times over.”

“Did you get anything from him?” Aethe scootched over, weakly, and rested her arm on Marco’s. “From your weird class skill, I mean.”

“I don’t know. I guess I have nothing better to do than to check.”

The system moved in strange ways sometimes, but Marco didn’t expect it to get quite as weird as it did next.

“Yeah, we got something. It’s…”

“Weird?”

Marco felt his consciousness slipping. He figured he had one last sentence in him.

“Yeah. Weird is one way to put it.”